Diocesan Resources
Racism and Migration - Spanish
Racism and Migration - Spanish
In the November 2018 pastoral letter against racism, Open Wide Our Hearts, the Catholic bishops of the United States urge all Catholics to acknowledge “the scourge of racism” that still exists in our hearts, words, actions and institutions. Racism is rooted in a failure to acknowledge the human dignity of people of different ethnic backgrounds. It does not reflect the love of neighbor that the Lord calls us to have. It denies the beauty of the diversity of God’s plan. Racism manifests itself in sinful individual actions, which contribute to structures of sin that perpetuate division and inequality. One area where racism has become evident is in the way that the United States has approached the issue of migration, historically and even today.
Ethnicity has long been a factor guiding migration policy in the United States. One of the earliest and most overt examples of this was the forced migration and enslavement of millions of African people to colonial North America. Slavery, and the racist ideas the slave trade was built upon, informed the development of migration policy. Another example was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, a federal law that effectively barred Chinese migration to the United States.